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More Inn, Less Comfort – Welcome to Hiroshima

So far this sums it up…Hiroshima is like the California of Japan, while Tokyo is more like New York. This time we are staying at the Comfort Inn Hiroshima (something we can identify from home) and the lobby looked comparable. We got off the Willer Express very early this morning and check-in wasn’t until 3pm but they allowed us to store our travel bags while we wander the city until check-in time (about 5 hours to kill, sheesh). First and foremost, Breakfast…There was a breakfast spot on the corner, $5 a piece for half a waffle, a couple slices of fruit, and unsweetened lemon tea…If you like all you can eat buffets, don’t come to Japan, lol. Ok, enough grousing about food, the plan was to head to Hiroshima Castle and see what there is to see. The weather got warmer and warmer as the day progressed, the beautiful sun did a way better job of keeping us warm here than in Tokyo. We were in the Peace Park part of town (an area dedicated to Peace after being the epicenter of where the US dropped the first Atomic Bomb, which killed generations of Japanese people) and we were looking at about a 30 min. walk to Hiroshima Castle (we’re cheap and we’re killing time, a deadly combination).
Hiroshima Castle was amazing, it was surrounded by a moat and completely remodeled into a museum of sorts (the original was destroyed in the A-bomb in 1945) and it gave us a great view of the city. We spent a couple hours wandering around, trying on samurai outfits and viewing swords on display with manuals written in Japanese, when we decided, you know what, its lunch time (call me greedy all you want). As we started heading back, we came across a shopping alley with plenty of different shops for the consumer in you. Personally, it has been a bit of quest for me to find the best food and drinks (non-alcoholic) in Japan. I have tried a juice that had strawberries all over it that turned out to be Strawberry Coffee (??), A Tropicana juice called Afternoon Fruit (weird after-taste), but so far the winners are a drink called C.C. Lemon (it tastes like Squirt basically) and Calpis Welchs Grape (It actually had grape bits in the drink, it tastes great despite the name). The next adventure was a restaurant called Jerk Kitchen (Jamaican food in Hiroshima, who knew?) all the way on the other side of town. And when we walked all the way over there, we found out it closes mid-day, doh!(Homer Simpson sound)
Oh well, its 3pm, we stopped at 7-Eleven got some snacks and headed to the room. Why is it, the Comfort Inn was smaller and less comfortable than any other hotel I have been in, in a long time…It wasn’t unbearable, just less than I expected (think more motel) but I can’t complain, it has a bed and the bath tub my body has been begging for. Now to find time to relax…

This trip has been full of wild experiences. So far, we like a drink named “C.C. Lemon” (like Squirt) and a food spot named “CoCo Ichibana” (good Indian curry) the best.

I’m glad we’re blogging to. It’s a great way to share what we’re up to it’ll be easy to for me to pull things off and make a scrap book of this trip. You know I still have stuff from Europe, Jamaica, ect. folded up in a journal? This is like having a cheat-sheet! LOL